MidwayDispatches

Still two years, seventy-three days to go

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien part 8/??

Seems like there’s quite a bit of interest in a dedicated post about alien biology and sociology, so leave your questions in the comments and I’ll write something up soon. Please keep in mind I am neither a biologist nor a sociologist nor a xeno/anthropologist so take all of this with a grain of salt and forgive me if some of the language isn’t perfect, but on the other hand posting something that’s wrong is usually the best way to get someone in the comments to explain why it is wrong so we all win either way I guess.

Continuing where we left off with the discussion with Silk about bodies and gender.

The main issue was that for aliens, there is no distinction between biological sex, gender identity, and sexuality (as in, the experience of being capable of sexual desire). The sea urchin phase has all three, the other phases have none of them. Like I said in my last post, they have NO concept of transgender identities, and asexuality in the sea urchin phase is something they only understand as a medication side effect or illness. They do have homosexuality and as far as I can tell, there have been very few places and periods in alien history where this was considered an issue. They almost treat it as a sort of misfiring of whatever instinct drives the sea urchin phase: just something that happens, it’s the body, what can you do.

That “it’s the body, what can you do” attitude became extremely clear as we started discussing my surgeries. Silk initially didn’t realise I had had any surgeries at all, or that I was on hormone treatment. Remember they’re functionally blind, so all he was getting was they/them pronouns, a fairly gender-neutral voice, and whatever chemical signals I was giving off (I’m just going to call it scent/smell from now on, the chemical detection thing is a bit cumbersome). Now imagine you’re an alien and that’s all the information you get. It’s not unreasonable to think “oh, this must be a “parent human”, like we have”. Silk quite reasonably assumed that I was a type or phase of human that normally doesn’t go to space, just like aliens in the parent phase don’t. And my “no I started gendered like any other human and deliberately made myself like this” was completely incomprehensible to him. What do you mean, CHANGE your body to fit your mind? Your mind is shaped by the body, not the other way around!

Of course he had a point: human minds are in human bodies and our bodies shape our brains and thus our minds through millions of years of evolution. But still there’s obviously a difference between humans and aliens, who went through the same process of evolution, because we CAN experience a disconnect between our body and our mind. I took my attempts to explain this to Silk quite seriously both out of personal interest but also because it was energising to encounter a completely new category of intellectual problem. Like trying to explain colour to a blind person. I had a lot of fun trying to explain certain religions that try to achieve a complete mental separation of the body while they were still alive. Silk thought this was hilarious, I think it triggered the paradox thing.

But finally after a lot of philosophical debate when it got right down to it Silk wanted to know about me.

Now I don’t normally talk to people about my birth sex, and I won’t talk about it here, but it felt churlish not to tell Silk about it because he was trying so hard to understand. So I told him what I had started out as and what I had done to make my body fit “me”. He was quiet through most of the explanation and then he asked “But how did you know what your body needed to look like?”

And there’s no satisfying answer to that, right? “I thought about it long and hard and just knew what felt right” is not really answering anything. So I just sort of stared into space (ha I didn’t write that to be literal but as it happens I was literally staring out into space, we were sitting at a viewport) for a while and then had what I still think was a stroke of brilliance:

Me: “When you become a parent after this, you will want to go home, right?”

Him: “Yes.”

Me: “Well, how do you know what home is?”

And then it was Silk’s turn to be quiet and then, and I realise this sounds like a movie script but it really happened, he said: “You know when your body feels like home?”

So there you go, we reached a breakthrough after all. I was quite pleased with that. Felt like a proper xeno/anthropologist. And then Silk repeated back to me what he had learned over the past week: that adult humans are all either “in the reproductive phase” (i.e. sea urchins, capable of/interested in sex and romance) or not (asexual people) but that this is an individual difference not dependent on age (we did go over the impact of things like medication and hormones but this was never a point of contention because aliens have the same thing); that there is such a thing as a feeling of gender that feels like being at home in your body when it matches your body and like not being home when it doesn’t; and that if the body doesn’t feel like home, it can be made to feel right. All in all not bad for a couple of treaty law specialists.

(I can already hear someone type up a thing about aromantics: I tried, okay, but this was another thing that is completely unknown to them and I had a hard enough time making him understand asexuality. If anyone wants to give it a go, find an alien and have at it.)

And then he said: “So you are without gender, but are still in the reproductive phase?” And I said yes.

And then his spines rattled.

At first I just thought oh, he’s happy that he finally understood it. But then he went very, very still. Like, not standard sea urchin still, where their outer spikes freeze and their body spikes keep undulating, but all the little body spikes just stood up straight and still. It very much gave the impression of someone in shock, and I confirmed later that yes, that is a threat response like our fight/flight/freeze.

And then he said: “Excuse me I have to go” and just rushed out of the room.

So that ruined my entire weekend because stupid as it may sound, after a whole week of talking about bodies and sexuality it hadn’t occurred to me until right that moment that maybe Silk had a reason beyond academic interest for asking me all this.

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien part 7/??

Sorry, sorry, I won’t do it again! Any cliffhangers from now on will be natural and not premeditated. In my defence, it was quite late and I wanted to go to bed.

Picking back up where we left off: Silk asked me if I used to have a partner. That’s how he phrased it: “Did you use to have a partner?” Now you may think that’s just mildly awkward phrasing because he could tell I didn’t have a partner at the moment, but his English is excellent and it’s not the sort of grammatical mistake he would make if he meant “Have you ever had a partner?” or something like that. So I asked for clarification and he said something like: “Back when you were still in the partnering phase, did you have a partner?”

That of course clarified absolutely nothing. Not that I think there is such a thing as being beyond the partnering phase for humans, but I was only in my early forties, so it was a bit destabilising to be told I was apparently no longer partner-able.

After a moment’s thought, I realised he was probably mapping alien life phases onto humans, which was a bit odd in itself because after so many years on Midway he should really know better. But still, I go “oh, no, no, humans don’t have phases like that, we can partner our whole adult life.” and he says: “Yes, but not you, right?” And we’re back to the original confusion.

The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “I’m sorry, I think I don’t quite understand what you are referring to.”

Him: “You use children’s pronouns.”

Me: “... I use gender neutral pronouns, yes.”

Him: “Sorry, yes, it’s just that parents in our species usually retain their sea urchin pronouns, but I shouldn’t have said children, you’re clearly an adult.”

Me: “Yes. I’m an adult who uses gender neutral pronouns.”

Him: “I was just asking if before the gender neutral pronouns you had a partner.”

Me: “My last partner was ten years ago. I was very much already using gender neutral pronouns.”

Him: “... What?”

So plot twist: turns out that aliens are incapable of separating gender from sexuality because they only have a sex and gender in the sea urchin phase. Silk literally could not conceptualise that I could be genderless and still be someone interested in partnership, romance, or sex. Initially I thought oh this will be easy to clear up, I’ll just tell him these things are not related in humans, but it wasn’t quite so simple. I’d try to explain, he’d ask some follow-up questions, I thought it was handled, and then the next day he’d come back with new questions.

For starters, the whole distinction between gender and biological sex was extremely difficult to explain because to aliens they literally cannot be separated. There’s no such thing as a transgender alien, apparently. They all have the experience of being genderless and then becoming male or female and then becoming genderless again but not a single one has ever wanted to be male or female when they were currently genderless, or felt male when they were biologically female, or whatever. I looked it up and there is genuinely no evidence that this is even a category for them. So for the first time in my life I was talking to someone whose approach to my gender was “yes, agender, makes perfect sense, but what is this nonsense about your body having been non-agender at the same time?” So whenever I use “gender” in the rest of this post just know that at some point I had to give up trying to teach him when to use gender and when to use sex.

“You said humans remain sexually active throughout adulthood but what about women’s menopause?” That is an end to reproductive capability, not sexual capability or desire --> new category error, these two things are temporally linked in aliens

“You changed from gendered to genderless but are there people who change from genderless to gendered?” Everyone is born with a biological sex --> This made him really uncomfortable, as if I was suggesting something paedophilic, though of course he never said that

And then we hit the REALLY big issue which was my surgeries, or the whole concept of gender affirming surgeries in general, which is a complicated topic that deserves its own post. And speaking of that I was thinking, would anyone be interested if I put up a post explaining more about alien biology and sociology? I sort of assumed everyone here would have a pretty good understanding but after so long on Midway I also kind of lost touch with what is and isn’t common knowledge and I do also see some new people in the comments. Let me know.

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien part 6/??

Wow so my last post went a bit viral outside this community it seems. We had a large influx of comments (thanks mods for handling this well and I’m sorry for the extra work) and a lot of newbie questions which were already addressed in the comments by community members (thank you all for that as well) but there was one recurring question that I still want to address:

How do you even fall in love with an alien?

And the answer is a very unsatisfying ‘the same way you fall in love with anyone else’.

Most people on Earth have never seen an alien; even fewer have interacted with one; and even fewer have interacted with them over a prolonged period of time. But when you do, you realise that they are still people. Yes, there are some fundamental differences even beyond the physical, in how they think and how they relate to others, but I can’t honestly say it’s all that different from a human from a completely different culture. I think maybe we forget this because society is so globalised nowadays but a couple of centuries ago, what did a native Brazilian and I don’t know, a Russian or something really have in common? But if they fell in love, we wouldn’t think that’s incomprehensible.

So I fell in love with Silk because he had a personality and likes and dislikes and a sense of humour. For some reason paradoxes are almost universally considered funny among aliens, I don’t know why, something about their cognitive architecture. I used to look up paradoxes to tell him to make him laugh (metaphorically speaking: they don’t actually laugh but they do rattle their spines together when they’re pleased) and making him laugh made me happy.

And yes well done you noticed I said ‘not JUST sexually attracted to him’ in my last post. I don’t think that’s really relevant to the point here and I don’t intend to go into it.

So back on topic. My first thought was that I needed to start dating. I thought I was feeling this way because I had gotten so out of the habit of connecting with people that even basic attention felt intoxicating and that it was a sign that I wanted romance. Unfortunately the dating pool on Midway is small. Pros: everyone is between 30 and 60, and I am pansexual. Cons: if it doesn’t work out you have to see these people every day for the rest of your time on Midway, and the number of people attracted to my body type is limited. That’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just a numbers game and I knew it when I had the neutspec surgeries so let’s not make this a thing in the comments. I knew the score and that’s fine but it all just meant that the concept of dating was easier than the practice of dating.

I went on a couple of dates, but nothing really worked out, and eventually I found myself on the other side of the table from what was really a quite lovely woman and thought: “I’d rather be with Silk, I wish Silk was here.” Quite a devastating realisation to have in the middle of a date.

So that plan failed and I was back to square one of “you are in love with your sea urchin coworker and you’ll kill each other if you touch.”

Next stop, of course, is looking online for other people who have gone through the same thing. We get a personal device that’s not monitored so I wasn’t worried about that and good thing too because it turns out you get a lot of porn (virtually all of it ridiculous) and very little actual information. I mostly ended up on xeno/anthropologist’s personal blogs which was nice but none of them seem to have been romantically involved with an alien (or if there were, I didn’t find them; I’d still be very interested to find more people so if you do know anyone, please post a link in the comments).

After all that I was left with the thought that maybe I really WAS the first person to ever go through it, and what was I going to do about it? “Nothing and hope it goes away” was high on the list as was asking for a transfer but that would’ve been a career killer. I remember thinking I was lucky Silk couldn’t see me because if he had, he probably would’ve caught on to me acting weird much earlier, which honestly maybe would’ve been better but it is what it is.

Maybe if I had better self-control, it would have stayed at this phase and I would’ve quietly suffered for a few more years until Silk went home and then I’d have never thought about it again. But I couldn’t help but poke at it, so one day I asked if I could ask him a personal question, and he said of course, and I asked: “I never see any alien couples on the station. I thought that was what the sea urchin phase was for?”

(Briefly considered stopping here for today as a cliffhanger, ha)

And he explained patiently that yes sea urchins do pair bond, usually monogamously and long term, but that this leads to ‘procreation’ and obviously procreation was not possible on the station (it’s not like we could put the brood in the swimming pool). They never found a good sea urchin contraceptive that doesn’t also kill sexual desire, so a lot of sea urchins on Midway were functionally asexual because they were on the pill, essentially, and I never knew. And then my mouth moved faster than my brain for a second and I blurted out “Are you?” and he got flustered and said no, the pills disagreed with him (found out later it’s a calcification issue, the pill can cause these little calcium nodules in their body that are harmless but uncomfortable when moving).

Well that was entirely the wrong thing to learn because I had just seen a bunch of sea urchin porn and had now learned that the man I was in love with did in fact have sexual urges and again, if we touch each other we die (or more likely I die). But also that’s not a normal coworker question to ask and I was genuinely worried about a visit from HR for harassment so for a couple of weeks after that I was very quiet and kept myself to myself. And then Silk asked me a question.

(That’s the cliffhanger for today, people)

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien part 5/??

Some enterprising people have gone through the records of Midway and discovered there was never an alien with comms name Silk on board. 1) You're creeps and 2) obviously that's not his real name, ever heard of privacy? I thought it would be an appropriate pseudonym. Aliens choose their comms name before they come to Midway, but Silk once told me that if he had had the chance to touch natural silk before coming, he would have called himself that because he loved it so much. A couple of years after arriving he got to touch the silk scarf of some woman and he said he had always regretted not asking her if he could keep it, even though he knew she'd probably have refused. I did consider getting him some from Earth but by that point I already knew we didn't have enough time for that.

We left off when I first thought let’s say an improper thought about Silk, and me trying very hard not to think about what that meant.

I guess a bit of background about my love life, or lack thereof, is necessary. My last relationship was back on Earth, but it ended when I applied for the job posting on Midway (quite amicably, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, he still wrote to me occasionally and I sent him some pictures). I hadn’t really had a partner since arriving on Midway and on the whole that didn’t bother me much. I’m not a very outgoing person. I was neither expecting nor looking for any sort of romantic involvement, so it all rather caught me by surprise.

It was quite a confused time and I mostly just tried to keep myself busy and not think about it. It’s amazing how long you can pretend everything is fine if you’re motivated enough. But then you find yourself lingering a bit at the office before the weekend because you hope the other person will ask to go for a drink and you know. But of course, Silk never asked, because why would he? I thought that if he was even feeling the same way at that point he, like me, would’ve considered it just some silly thought born from being in space for too long.

So finally I asked.

Again, looking back it was a bit stupid because it’s not like sea urchins have a concept of what going for a drink even means. Besides actually drinking the drink and talking, I mean. And even if he had, it’s normal to ask coworkers for a drink occasionally, which really is why I felt comfortable asking because it’s plausible deniability, right, even for myself. So I asked, casually, and Silk immediately said yes in this really cheerful voice, and I felt my heart flutter.

So yeah, that’s pretty much when I realised I was in love.

I was not prepared to fall in love with an alien. I know there are people who are into that sort of thing and that’s fine, but I had never had any interest in any of that. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to figure it out. So naturally my first response was to fucking panic. Sorry for the language, but it was appropriate in this context because I was not handling it well. I felt like a pervert. Of course I don’t feel like that anymore and even at the time there was this weird tension between me feeling like that while also knowing that there wasn’t anything wrong with people for being attracted to what they are attracted to. It was like there was this separate little category for me where I was uniquely deranged.

I think part of it was that I was clearly in love, not just sexually attracted to him. In some ways it would’ve been easier if it had been just sexual because people get off on the weirdest things, right? Some people are into getting stepped on in high heels, I think that’s weird but it’s obviously not a moral failing. Anyway getting a bit sidetracked here but my point is, I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t emotional.

But that first drink I also felt really bad. It felt like I was lying to him. I don’t even really know what I was hoping to achieve. I almost wanted to say that I was just enjoying the feeling of having a crush on someone but I wasn’t even enjoying it, I was terrified the whole time and feeling miserable at being such a pervert (again, don’t think so now but did at the time). I was sitting there with Silk on the other side of the plastic (I realise I hadn’t said this yet but there were three restaurants/bars, one for humans, one for aliens, and one mixed, and the mixed one had tables with a plastic sheet down the middle for safety) trying to have a conversation like a normal person and the whole time I was thinking that maybe I should book a session with a virtual therapist instead. And Silk was completely oblivious and just chatting away. He was a lot more talkative outside of work. Isn’t it strange that I can’t remember what he talked about at all, but I can remember that I didn’t want him to stop.

Oh and someone asked about the chess club: virtual boards, where you have to announce your moves, and then the aliens had a little braille board that was updated with the moves. Their win rate was 62% when I joined and got slightly better after that because I’m a lousy chess player.

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien 4/??

Hi everyone, thanks for your question on the last post. Some were already addressed in the comments but I wanted to highlight a few:

“Did you ever see pictures of Silk as a child?” -> Yes, he showed me some pictures of where he grew up and he was in a few of them. But honestly he just looked like an alien child, it’s not like I could recognise him.

“Did Silk ever come to the pool?” -> No.

“What did you do in your weekends besides swimming?” -> Attended lectures, joined a mixed species chess club, became a bit more serious about the gym, and went to the cinema without checking what was on first. Saw a lot of interesting movies that way (but also some absolute trash).

There was also a long discussion about what would count as the human equivalent of an alien who doesn’t like wet feet and if I’m allowed to declare a winner, I choose ‘a human who hates being snug under a blanket’ suggested by BlueMuffin43.

Moving on.

I said earlier it took about four months before I started realising I didn’t just see Silk as a friendly coworker. I spent some time thinking about it and tried to recreate a timeline, and I think it’s not quite true to say it took that long, but that’s with the benefit of hindsight. At the time I was highly motivated not to look at it too much because. Well. I mean, even if Silk had been human, I probably would have resisted falling in love because it’s bad form to have relationships with coworkers and especially with coworkers who are supposed to be on the opposite side of the negotiation table. But to be honest (and this is the type of thing I couldn’t have said when I was still employed) on Midway these categories tend to get a bit loose after a while anyway. There’s only so many people on board, if you had to maintain strict professional boundaries there wouldn’t be a mixed species pub quiz team or chess club, you know.

So what I thought at the time was the first sign that I was starting to feel something for Silk was when I wondered what his spines would feel like. Obviously we’ve all wondered what an alien feels like, especially when you first arrive or when you first see them, but I’d been there for a decade, it stops being interesting after a while. But one day we were working and Silk tapped on the window and started going over some text and I was looking at the tip of his spine tracing the line of braille and I wondered what that would feel like. Immediately pushed that thought away of course, massively weirded out, did not want to think about what that meant. But it definitely wasn’t a normal coworker thought, you know.

But that was then, whereas if I look back now, it’s not that simple. Because looking back I was actually having a good time at work. And I like my work, I always liked my work, you don’t live in space for 19 years if you don’t love it, but it’s different to like the work and to like being at work. And I was starting to like being at work. On Monday I was excited to tell Silk what I had done the previous day, that type of thing. At the time I just thought I was getting out of my shell a bit, being healthier, being more social, but looking back I’m pretty sure it was because of Silk.

As I was thinking about that, I started wondering if he had something similar. I never really asked him (we were grown people with legal careers, okay, you don’t ask “when did you first get a crush on me?”) and I don’t think I really understood him well enough at the time to be able to tell. Before you arrive at Midway, they give you this primer on sea urchin body language, and let me tell you it’s useless. There’s an illustrated guide and a VR program that goes with it but one thing they don’t tell you about sea urchins is that they don’t photograph well. Even the VR captures don’t do them justice. For starters, sea urchins don’t make idle movements. You know how humans, if they’re sitting around and just waiting for something or whatever, will make tiny movements? If you saw someone sit perfectly still, like a mannequin, you’d be creeped out. Sea urchins don’t do that. It was explained to me once as something to do with their muscles, or lack of muscles, or whatever, but the end result is that when they don’t have to do anything they just… stop. So the big spines are completely, perfectly stationary, but then there are these constant little undulating movements of the small spikes that they can’t really control. And that constant movement in between the dark spines gives this mesmerising pearlescent effect that’s really completely different to see in real life than in pictures or VR. Plus they almost always make the VR models move a little bit or people complain it looks unrealistic.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit sidetracked here, but my point is that they do make you study sea urchin body language but it’s aimed at BIG gestures. “This means thank you, this means I am scared, this means I am happy.” The assumption is that you’ll just use verbal communication as much as possible and not rely on body language cues, which is a lot safer in interspecies communication anyway. But of course that presumes that you want to tell the other person what’s going on, and if (big if) Silk was already feeling something for me when I started to fall for him, he of course had as much incentive not to mention it as I did. So I don’t know when it started for him.

It’s actually dinner time here (still over two years to go and I am already bored of the food rotation, how come in twenty years there has not been an improvement in ship’s provisions) but as always, leave your questions in the comments and I’ll get to them when I can.

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien part 3/??

Welcome back, like I said in the previous post, today I’ll mostly be talking about metamorphosis.

I expect a lot of people are interested in the whole metamorphosis aspect and continuity of self, which of course had a huge impact on our relationship, so I wanted to take the time to go in depth on that. I’ll do my best to explain it the way I came to understand it over time.

Aliens are hatched as brood, which are non-sapient, and the best comparison I was given was with kangaroos. You know how tiny kangaroos (and I guess all marsupials?) crawl into the pouch and then have to stay there to grow into a proper baby? We wouldn’t really say the jelly bean that crawls into the pouch is sentient, would we, but clearly it turns into a baby kangaroo that is. Alien brood are a bit like that. So they really don’t have a concept of ‘self’ until they metamorphose into children. From that point forward they do have a self that persists across metamorphoses, but each life phase has different instincts and body plans. So a specific alien may have a character trait that persists across life phases but expresses itself differently in each phase. They carry forward memories (after the brood phase, though Silk claimed he did vaguely remember what it was like to be aquatic, he said it was peaceful to always be floating), but the emotional attachment to the memories isn’t really there. I think the closest thing may be remembering what you were like as a teenager, and remembering you were a bit of a disaster but being able to look back and say “well, I was a bundle of hormones and anxieties then, I wasn’t really the same person.” You can remember that, I don’t know, not being invited to a concert you didn’t want to go to in the first place felt like the end of the world, and you can understand why it felt like that, but you also know you’d never feel like that now. It’s not the same of course but it’s the closest example I’ve been able to think of.

Silk’s dislike of wet feet was one of these things that was already present in childhood and, I’m sure, is still present now that he’s a parent. The other kids used to make fun of him for it. He was a bit reluctant to tell me about it at first, I think, but I wasn’t very good yet at picking up on his cues. But me blundering into that topic led to our first real conversation. I didn’t really have alien friends, though over the years there were coworkers or other station residents that I was friendly with. There was usually more interspecies contact among the scientists. They even had a regular mixed-species pub quiz night, but because of course we have no cultural knowledge or history in common it was almost all abstract science questions and I never participated. So this was really the first time I talked with one of them about the metamorphosis in depth. It always seemed a very private topic to me but Silk quickly set me straight on that. He clearly (or, well, clear to me now) felt much more awkward about the wet feet thing than about discussing metamorphosis with me and was relieved to change the topic. So I asked him what I’d really been wanting to ask an alien pretty much from the moment I got to Midway but had never dared: isn’t it terrifying to suddenly go blind?

He told me that this was something most alien children are worried about. Parents always say it’s okay, they won’t mind, it won’t be scary, but how can it not be scary, right? And children often try to prepare for it by playing games with blindfolds and stuff but that’s not the same because they’re meant to have vision, so being blind as a child is something completely different from being a sea urchin who is meant to only have light/dark photoreceptive cells. But then when he had gone through the metamorphosis, it just felt right. There is an adjustment period where they learn to use their new body but he said the parents were right, it was never scary. I also asked if it was weird to think that one day he would have sight again, and he said it didn’t feel weird and he was looking forward to it, but that it would probably be weird not to taste things anymore. He meant the chemical receptors, not all taste, obviously they can still taste food and things as parents.

I had already been a bit pushy I think so I didn’t ask any more, but I remember that conversation really well because it finally answered some things I had been wondering about for a while. Like I said earlier, this wasn’t some whirlwind romance so after this conversation it still took, I don’t know, another four months? Something like that, before I started to feel something was different. But I don’t want to mix too many topics here because I think there may be some questions regarding the whole metamorphosis thing and I’d like to focus on those in the comments instead of muddling everything together.

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien part 2/??

Thank you for your comments on my previous post. If my writing is a bit informal or conversational, that’s because it is either that or legalese, my only two settings. To answer a few basic questions:

 Still two years and seventy-three days to go until arrival on Earth.

I use they/them pronouns, thanks for asking.

Yes, I was on Midway during the decompression event but that was well before Silk and I met so I won’t be going into that.

In order to prevent confusion, I’ve decided to start from the beginning and provide some context.

So first, daily life on Midway. Everything that can be compromised on, was compromised on when designing Midway. I already mentioned the gravity, but we’re also talking about working weeks (not actually weeks but 5 days on, one day off), temperature (obviously you can adjust this in your quarters but in common areas it is always 23 degrees which is quite uncomfortable at first but you get used to it), and even the day-night rhythm (this is hardest to get used to and what was hardest to readjust to now that I’m on a human spaceship again). It’s actually a really nice atmosphere because everyone is very collaborative. We’re all in it together, you know, years from home and doing our best. Of course there are ups and downs but all in all I had a good time.

Then the work. What happens is that high-level diplomats want to achieve something, they reach a small agreement, that goes to the lawyers, who draft some proper wording, and that comes to us and we then have to work through how this specific wording could be misinterpreted, how it would interact with other laws or processes, what unforeseen scenarios it could create, etc. That then goes back up the chain and the high-level diplomats have something new to talk about. This is why it all takes forever. We do this in human-alien pairs so that when we make suggestions for adjustments to the language we can immediately check with the other party if we’re going to be making things better or worse.

So most of the time, Silk and I were on opposite sides of a plastic partition reading an ungodly amount of documents (I know someone is going to ask, so: they have a braille-like script and a linked version in regular writing so any updates to one version are synced) in silence and occasionally one of us would knock on the plastic to ask to discuss something. You can go for a very long time like this without ever talking about personal stuff and I actually think we didn’t really say anything beyond work stuff for six months? I know that may sound a bit crazy but you have to remember I didn’t see this assignment as any different from my previous work in anything but scope. I didn’t socialise that much with my human colleagues so I wasn’t exactly primed to socialise with my alien colleagues.

What finally happened is that we were leaving the office together one day at the end of the day and Silk met another alien in the hall and stopped, so then I had to stop because if there are two sea urchins side by side in the hallway you absolutely cannot pass unless you have a death wish, and they said something I didn’t quite catch because they speak rather quickly amongst themselves, and then Silk switched to English and said: “This is MidwayDispatches, they are working with me and they are very nice.” I was a bit shocked because like I said, we hadn’t really spoken about anything but work, but the way he said it sounded like he was sincerely pleased to know me. And that’s a bit awkward, right, because then I felt bad that maybe he thought I was a friend when I thought he was just a coworker or something. I had to make a choice: do I become more friendly or do I become more professional? And at the time I framed it as well, if I make it awkward by being too distant the next few years of work are going to be really painful, but I don’t mind saying now that I was a bit lonely and was rather pleased someone thought I was nice.

I don’t want you to get the impression it was some sort of whirlwind romance. When I say I “became more friendly” I mean I asked him how his day off had been, if he had any plans for the next day off, that type of thing. Basic coworker stuff. And he started asking it back, which was good for me to be honest because after a few times of saying “oh, nothing much” I started making plans just so I wouldn’t look pathetic in front of him. Not that I think he ever thought of me as pathetic.

I actually just realised I should probably clarify something about the language before we get misinformation in the comments. For those who don’t know, they all learn English and we all learn Primary. And yes, it IS possible to learn Primary without surgery. I’m not opposed to surgical body modifications, I’ve had my share of them, but you just straight up don’t need it. Yes you have an accent but it’s not like one of us was going to go undercover as one of them, is it? They’re better at mimicking our sounds so their English tends to be really good. Most of the issues are with figurative speech which honestly is the same as with second language learners the world over. So no I did not have surgery (for that) and neither did anyone I know and yes you too can learn Primary if you put your mind to it. They make really good alien AI models nowadays if you want someone to practice with.

Right, tangent over. Anyway so I started making more weekend plans, and one day I mentioned I was going to go swimming and Silk said he had never been to the pool. Now he had lived there for I think eighteen years at that point. Even if you don’t like swimming, surely you’d go once to try it out, right? Turns out he disliked wet feet (spines, whatever, you know what I mean). I want you to properly appreciate this: they are a species from a world that consists predominantly of sandbanks in shallow seas, their brood phase lives in water, and this man disliked getting his feet wet. I was intrigued. I asked him, was that always the case? Did you dislike wet feet as a child? And that’s how we first got talking about the metamorphosis which I will talk about in my next post.

[midwaydispatches]

I was in a relationship with an alien part 1/??

Hello everyone, I’ve actually been hanging around this space for years now but I made a new account for this. I’m currently on my way back to Earth (can’t say “home” yet, it still feels odd) from Midway and have quite a lot of time to fill. I thought some people might be interested in my story. I was in a relationship with an alien while on Midway until he went back to his homeworld six years ago. I’ve kept quiet about it for professional reasons, of course, but I’m retired now and the new account should stop a basic search for my name from returning anything I wouldn’t want my sister to see. So I thought, may as well share my experiences and I don’t know, maybe help some other people in similar situations.

First, some background: I was 32 years old when I arrived at Midway. Objectively it's not exactly the lap of luxury but believe me, after three years on a spaceship it's like a five-star hotel. Full gravity (technically 0.89 gravity, it's a compromise with the aliens), a swimming pool, and a choice of restaurants? (2 is a choice) I was in heaven. Of course, in practice it's a job like any other and you mostly see the inside of your office but at least the view from your room is nice. I'm going to have to get used to blue skies again when I'm back, I suppose.

Anyway, so I arrive to work as a junior legal officer, checking import/export compliance paperwork and such. Worked for a couple of years, got promoted, worked for a couple of years more etc etc, finally ended up an interstellar agreements specialist at 41 working on actual complex diplomatic projects. That's where the interesting stuff starts, or at least the stuff that's interesting for this forum i.e. when I met Silk (I did learn to pronounce his given name but I wouldn't know how to write it in Roman letters so we'll stick with his comms name).

But I want to explain a bit more about the general relationship between humans and aliens on Midway because I think it's important to understand the full context. It's not as if Silk was the first alien I worked with and vice versa. He had been there a lot longer than I had, actually. I tried to upload a picture of the station layout with this post but it keeps getting blocked by the ship's firewall so you’ll have to look up pictures yourself. The basics that you need to know are that most of the tech stuff is contained in the central column, and then the rings are where all the people are. The small ring is where all the stores and offices and such are; we called that Main Street, the aliens called it something that more or less means Town Square, so pretty much the same. Humans and aliens aren’t forbidden from going to each other’s habitat rings but it is unusual because there’s always the risk of contact. And anyway, humans clutter up the place with furniture and sea urchins have no furniture so it’s just uncomfortable for everyone both ways. I had to rearrange my whole room for when Silk would come over and I brought one of my chairs to his room.

One of the things people always ask is if you ever see any aliens that aren't in the sea urchin phase (note: I know some people object to this term but in my 19 years on Midway not a single alien has ever cared, they don't know what a sea urchin is and when it's described to them they just go "yeah sounds logical"). And the answer is yes but very very rarely. I saw a child only once and only for a couple of weeks before its metamorphosis started. She (became female after metamorphosis) was on that transport ship because she wanted to be an anthropologist and if she wouldn’t be on the next ship to Earth, she’d have to wait another five years. And twice I saw parents, who stayed for a couple of years each. The sea urchins barely have vision so sometimes parents are needed to inspect certain imports from Earth and it’s better to do that at Midway than take another six years to send it back from the homeworld. Never saw any brood but I can't imagine why you'd take brood into space anyway. By the time I left there were only sea urchins on the station. Both the child and the parents were obviously having a really hard time being there, though the parents were very nice people and taking things in stride. I spoke with the child once after her metamorphosis before she shipped out and she was relieved to be a sea urchin now.

So anyway I had already seen a lot of aliens by then and had worked together with quite a few. We normally worked in a shared office with plastic shielding for safety. It's really not all that different from the job I had on Earth. Silk and I had actually already worked together twice before on some small trade contracts, but just a few days at a time, and to be honest I didn't really pay much attention at the time because I had some other stuff going on. But eventually we both got put on the new xeno/anthropology deal which took until last year (link to the announcement here) so it was still going when Silk left. Come to think of it, maybe I should’ve sent him the press release but I’m sure he didn’t need me to tell him about it. It probably made the news over there as well.

I don't know what people would find most useful to hear so I think I'll leave it there for now and maybe you can leave a comment with what you want to know about. I was thinking to first explain how we got started as coworkers but maybe that's a bit too much context. But without it I feel that maybe you wouldn't really get how we got started. Anyway, let me know in the comments.

[midwaydispatches]

Humans, Aliens Sign Xeno/Anthropology Exchange Accords Governing Contact, Jurisdiction

Automatically generated report with 100% human QC.

MIDWAY STATION, April 25 — The United Earth Federation and the alien Cabinet signed a landmark diplomatic accord on Wednesday, establishing the most detailed framework to date for interspecies relations.

The agreement, formally titled the Xeno/Anthropology Exchange Accords, was concluded aboard Midway Station, a jointly constructed space station positioned equidistant between Earth and the alien homeworld. Negotiators on both sides described the pact as a pragmatic step forward in a relationship that has remained cautiously cooperative since first contact.

“This is not a symbolic agreement,” said Elena Marovic, Earth’s High Commissioner for Extrasolar Affairs, speaking through a sealed transmission chamber. “It is a working document that governs how two fundamentally incompatible forms of life can coexist, collaborate, and avoid tragic mistakes.”

The accords set strict limits on the number of authorized visitors permitted to travel between the two worlds each year, expanding existing quotas while introducing layered screening protocols. All exchanges must occur within controlled environments designed to maintain reasonable separation, including multi-barrier containment systems and remote-presence interfaces.

At the core of the agreement are new provisions governing criminal liability and jurisdiction, long a source of uncertainty in prior exchanges. Under the new framework, individuals—human or alien—who violate interspecies protocols will be subject to the laws of their home civilization, but with joint investigative oversight. A newly established Interstellar Arbitration Panel will adjudicate disputes where responsibility is contested.

“Ambiguity has been our greatest risk,” said Fernleaf [comms name, red.], member of the alien Cabinet. “Clarity reduces the probability of loss events.”

The lethal nature of direct contact has shaped nearly every aspect of the accords. Although only the alien explorer phase is lethal to humans, prolonged exposure to all human bodily fluids, including sweat, can lead to anaphylaxis and death in all alien life phases. As a result, the agreement mandates redundancies in all shared environments, including automated shutdown procedures, layered quarantine zones, and continuous biometric monitoring.

Since first contact, interactions have relied heavily on robotic intermediaries and virtual communication systems, though face-to-face interactions are common between residents of Midway and xeno/anthropologists on both planets. The new accord formalizes these practices and expands opportunities for physical presence on each other’s planet, while funding expanded research into safer methods of indirect collaboration.

Despite the constraints, relations between the two species have remained broadly positive, driven by mutual scientific and cultural curiosity. Joint research initiatives have already yielded advances in materials science and energy systems.

Not all observers are convinced the accords go far enough. The Human Sovereignty Coalition, a political bloc on Earth, warned that increasing visitor quotas could heighten the risk of containment failures. “We are normalizing a relationship that carries existential hazards,” the group said in a statement.

Conversely, the Interstellar Exchange Initiative, a multispecies organization advocating deeper cooperation, praised the agreement as “a necessary evolution” that balances safety with opportunity. Alien representatives indicated similar internal debates, though details remain limited due to differences in political transparency.

Midway Station itself stands as a testament to what negotiators describe as “cooperative distance”—a structure built jointly but operated through segregated systems.

The accords will come into force following ratification processes on both worlds, expected to conclude within the year. Until then, existing protocols will remain in place. For now, officials on both sides emphasized that the agreement reflects a shared commitment to coexistence under extraordinary constraints.

“We cannot shake hands,” Marovic said. “But we can still make agreements—and keep them.”